Every afternoon on our way back from school we would ask him when he was going to start making our shoes, and like other craftsmen in a slow world, he made the vague promise of tomorrow. But the poor village cobbler could not even afford to buy all the necessary tools for making shoes, as he did a feeble trade in mending odd shoes at cheap prices. And still we presented ourselves at his stall regularly every afternoon, lured not only by the original promise he had made our father in the hour of his need but by all the bright hopes of his making us a nice pair of Angrezi shoes with which he sought to secure the concession of a longer delay from our insistent claims.
At length, when he could make no more false promises and yet had not earned enough money to buy all the tools for making new shoes, he went and invested his meagre savings in buying two pairs of cheap native-style shoes in the town of Nowshera and satisfied the demands of the sons of the Babu whose word had secured him the privilege of sitting at the crosssroads to earn a meal a day and whose word could lead to the withdrawal of this privilege. But when the shoes were delivered at our house, and we saw two pair of coarse indigenous shoes, we sulked and refused even to try them on. Conscious of the fact, however, that he could not both accept a bribe and then expect it to suit the taste of his children, as other more courageous bribe-takers would do, my father raised his voice and cowed us into submission with the threat of the terrible wrath that was latent in his tiger’s growl. The shoes turned out to be a little on the small side. And we sobbed and sulked about the house for a few days, till a slap on my face and a sound thrashing for Ganesh put an end to our protests.
We bore the blisters patiently till they threatened to swell our feet. Whereupon the shoes were actually taken to town to be stretched, the cost to come out of my father’s pocket. They were easier when they arrived. The sport of oiling them to soften their texture made us forget the soreness of our feet and our hearts, and the familiarity of habit washed away the stains of bitterness.
But the equanimity of the life of our family was always being disturbed. When there was no hostility between our parents and the outside world or between our parents and us children, then our own quarrels resounded from the walls and the house was aflame with wild shouts and the abuse we hurled at each other, for the jealousy between Ganesh and me was intensifying into open hostility now.
The blame cannot be equally shared between Ganesh and me. I must confess it was mostly my fault. As a compensation for the sick child in me I was acquiring a deliberate self-will: in consequence I was growing up to be an independent, vain, aggressive and outspoken little person, showing off and expressing myself at the cost of others.
My mother’s doting affection had encouraged this. She was so proud of my naive flights of fancy, my games and tricks, that she even began to see mystical significance in most of my pranks. Ganesh was naturally resentful at such absurd favouritism.
For instance, when I made a catapult out of the triangular branch of a tree for shooting birds, she suggested that I had been inspired by God to make the very weapon with which I had been wounded by Cunningham Sahib, so that I could wreak my revenge on him.
I would steal out of the living room in the still, hot days and sit making a bungalow for myself in a corner of the verandah, like the bungalows of the Sahibs. I reproduced the necessary atmosphere by planting a discarded chair in the middle and by spreading copies of the old catalogues of Whiteaway Laidlaw & Co. Bolder still, I saw no reason why the disused packing-box on the verandah should not signify the lavatory, although there was no commode in it. I would apply myself to the work of constructing this Angrezi-style house, convinced that a few days of imaginative carpentering would create a perfect model. Nor was my joy in the liberty of inventive design spoiled by the heat and perspiration that accrued, though the fear of Ganesh’s intrusion and the shame of being found in the midst of my occupation tinged the pleasure somewhat.
I preferred to play in secret, especially as I was talking to an invisible playmate, a girl friend I had imagined. I think I had heard my mother once talking to someone about how I should grow up and marry a pretty little Mem, and I had worked the suggestion into a fantasy as concrete as the symbolic appurtenances of a Sahib’s existence could permit. ‘Hallo,’ I would shout the only English word I knew at this time and then, addressing my companion, continue, ‘tish-mish, tish-mish, bish …’ which was the sepoy’s idea of Angrezi speech. I would run down the verandah chasing her, caress her lovely golden hair if she cried and fairly smother her face with kisses … My mother caught me at this game one day, and, with an esoteric belief in the potentialities of the unknown, wondered whether I was only indulging in make-believe or whether I really saw something. For if I really had the power to see something which was invisible to others, I might be a blessed spirit reincarnated through her womb. I might, indeed, be the god Krishna playing with the gopies! But the chances of my canonization were spoiled by Ganesh, who claimed some of the properties I had assembled, and by my father’s contemptuous smile when my mother told him about my histrionics.
Apart from the ‘promised Messiah’ in me, whose moods she explained as spiritual portents, my mother indulged me with that naturalness in her treatment of her progeny which she had inherited from her village ancestors. Herself a force of nature, only superficially controlled by the respectability she had acquired through marriage to ‘izzat’, she let us grow up in the dust as elemental creatures without much help, only warning us now and then against contamination by untouchables and low-class children. So that when she saw me in my most diabolical, destructive and rebellious moods, she turned away after administering perfunctory abuse, seeing in my obstinacy the germs of strength and firmness of character; in my wantonness all my future good humour and facility for fighting through the hazards of life, and in my abounding happiness the mercy of Saints which compensated her for her own sadness in the face of life.
Ganesh had already been humbled, since the days of my eloquent, parrot-like repetitions of jargon, into recognizing my superior powers of retention. With the bluff of my importance bolstered up by my mother, I would go out of my way to annoy him and provoke him into quarrels, knowing that my delicate health would enable me to get off lightly if a difference came for arbitration and judgement before the supreme court of our parents.
The surest way to rouse my brother’s ire, I had discovered, was by taking possession of his property.
Ganesh had, through a calculated acquisitiveness and careful use of things, hoarded a large number of copybooks, red and blue pencils, red tape, quills, nibs etc., which we used to get from our father, who was in charge of the office stationery, while I usually squandered my share with a wanton prodigality as if merely to be in a position to envy my brother’s treasure afterwards.
One day when Ganesh was away on an errand in the afternoon, I discovered his dump behind a box in the living room. I eagerly ransacked it and appropriated two each of the best red and blue pencils, a copy book and various small items.
And I began forthwith to scribble and draw in the exercise book with these pencils. I would write, in my large, childish handwriting, letters so bold that they covered a whole page, and fantastic designs which continued from one page to another.
As I sat back with my head in my hands to look at my handiwork from all sides, as a full-fledged artist might do when he withdraws from his easel to see his picture the more clearly from a distance, Ganesh lighted upon the scene without warning. Recognizing his pencils and notebook, he fell upon me with that peculiar fury with which he was wont suddenly to break his patient, insidious reserve.
‘What is the matter? Why are you quarrelling?’ my mother cried from the kitchen.
‘Look, mother, what he has done!’ Ganesh shouted, indignant at my vandalism.
Shiva began to weep to see me being beaten, though I was actually having the upper hand, for while Ganesh kicked with his feet and his elbow, I pinched and scratched and bit wherever I could.
Thereupo
n my mother came running to separate us.
‘Look, mother!’ Ganesh said, contorting his face into a frown of pained and outraged innocence and edging away at the sight of mother.
‘What has he done, eater of your masters, that you are raising such a hue and cry?’ my mother abused him.
‘He has stolen my pencils and is scribbling on my notebooks,’ Ganesh said.
‘I was only drawing a picture of his ugly face,’ I said. ‘Look at his long ears!’
My mother looked at the scribbles and merely said, ‘Don’t mock at your brother, child, and give him his pencils, the eater of his masters! I shall get you some more for yourself.’
‘There, this is you, mother, in the picture and that is father,’ I said, pointing to the huge cartoons.
‘Let me see,’ my mother said and, without recognizing any significant forms, she said encouragingly, ‘How nice, you must show it to your father when he comes home.’
Lured by my mother’s promise of pencils, I yielded the booty. But nothing could be done about the book.
As if he were destined to draw the wrath of heaven on himself even when I was guilty, Ganesh complained to our father in the evening about how I had spoilt his book. My father shouted at us both roundly: ‘I will break your bones, sons of a pig, if you don’t stop quarrelling. Haven’t I enough troubles at the office that as soon as I come home you eat my head? You have made my life a misery. I blow my brains out earning a living for you all, and this is the reward I get! Rape-mother!’
‘What has mother done to be raped like that?’ my mother protested. ‘And why make yourself a pig?’
‘Why don’t they share the things that are given to them?’ my father burst out. ‘Are they going to fight over my property like this when I die? I shall cut them all out and leave my money to a Dharmsalla if they are going to wrangle with each other and not preserve the spirit of the family …’ And then his voice would tone down to a disillusioned, tired, self-pitying air: ‘What is the use of serving this bitch of a Sarkar in order to provide for this progeny? Look at that eldest swine, Harish! Look at his ingratitude! …’
On this theme my father and mother were in complete agreement and their talk having achieved the inevitable catharsis, they soon forgot our silly quarrel that had led to it.
10
I rarely see a child nowadays without wondering on what mysterious course or violent act his mind is drifting, what strange and unforeseen adventure he is deliberating, how the colours of his soul are changing. For, as I look back upon the first seven years of my own half unconscious and half conscious childhood, I see myself, despite the rigours of the restricted, narrow routine world of the cantonment with all its taboos, flowing like a stream, now bright and vivacious with the sunbeams which played upon it, now gloomy with the tears of my sorrow, but always flowing, trickling through the dams and barriers placed in my way, or charging across them so as to demolish them and sweep them aside, lean and starved by the majesty of the sun or swollen and blustering, but unstayed. I did not, of course, know the direction in which I was going, and often I was apt to change my course, but in the main I flowed with the other streams which flowed by me, as if I, and the deep creative urges in me, were drawn by some inner magnetic attraction to each other and to the big broad river of life which flowed not far away.
It was in the driving force of these creative impulses that I found compensation for all the deprivations of those drab, commonplace days during which one was growing from an embryo to childhood. Thus when I think of the armed camps of Miarmir and Nowshera, I recall the enchantment of many adventures not only in the heart of my own dreams and fantasies but in the broad outer world. And certain moments, which are usually called the highlights, make these days glow till the first playgrounds of my childhood seem the happiest part of my life, because perhaps it is the most innocent and sensitive.
In what enchanted hours my senses and my heart opened to the beauties and terrors of the frontier landscapes I do not remember. But I know that when I was nearing the age of seven, certain sights and sounds became indelibly fixed on my mind and formed the stable background of all my memories of later years. So vivid, indeed, are these impressions that even now, if I close my eyes, I can beckon the exact texture of the atmosphere at noon in the Nowshera cantonment, with all the minute rainbow-coloured particles of light revolving before my eyes almost as though in a kaleidoscope. And, of course, the bigger things in that landscape are to me now like fables of my early imaginings which can never grow old with repetition.
The world was certainly abundant in those days. But in the vast profusion of the objects of sense I recall some heroes which were dominant.
For instance, there were the ladders of heaven, the bare, copper-coloured and ochre-brown mountains which stretched beyond the dry river bed on the edge of the Malakand Barracks, protuberant near at hand but rising to dizzy, rugged heights, with steep climbs and descents until they were lost in the mists of what I was told were the ranges of the Hindu Kush. And in the small hollows of the grey ridges nestled stone huts that seemed part of the ochre hills, the hovels of the Pathans, dark, dark and emitting smoke of fuel fires through the dingy doorways. Between the edges and the crags of the mountains, on little bits of level ground, grew scanty harvests of wheat or maize, while a scarecrow always stood frightening me with its bamboo neck crowned by a torn western hat; for I had been told that the Pathans put into these scarecrows the ghosts of the Tommies they killed in the wars.
Along the Lunda river, on the road, flowed always the caravans of donkeys and camels and men, loaded with hides and skins, bricks, sacks of grain or cloth, leaving clouds of dust behind them as the caravan drivers with their torn tunics honked the animals with their big sticks. And the hard-working Pathan women strode along in their red salwars and black tunics, firewood or pitchers of water on their heads, seemingly as ferocious as their men, with their hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed visages, but tender to their own young and to others like me who remember receiving from them big chunks of bread and pickles to eat many a time during their wanderings. The old men bent double with age and work, who tended flocks of sheep and goats, were my favourites, because they seemed too feeble to hurt, though I was always being warned at home that I would surely be kidnapped one day if I hobnobbed unaccompanied with the shepherds.
Beyond the primitive landscape of the hills and mountains, beyond Peshawar where I was born and the Khyber Pass where father had been, in my cosmogony of that time ruled the Badshah of Kabul, to whose kingdom of Afghanistan we were connected by the metalled Grand Trunk Road. At the base of this road, before the big railway bridge, across the Lunda by the timber yards, the mushroom misery of the urban areas betrayed the breath of another world which was to make permanent dents on my memory.
There, on an empty rutted corner from which a side road led to the Sadar Bazaar, stood the tonga carts in higgledy-piggledy confusion, redolent of the acrid smell of horse dung and straw but gay with the loud haggling of the drivers and the customers, the neighing of the horses and the din on the anvil of the smith who hoofed all kinds of beasts of burden outside his little booth of a shop. I remember that as we passed by and showed the slightest sign of fatigue on our faces, the waiting tonga-wallahs would come shouting and dragging father each towards his tonga, clamouring for a fare even as they bargained. Only very rarely did father respond, however, and we trudged home in the name of exercise or of the need to do some more shopping in the bazaar, though actually, I suspect, it was the cost of a fare to Malakand Barracks which decided the question.
So to the bazaar we sped. And there my heart burst with happiness at the sight of the heaps of fruit rising in tiers, basket upon basket, on the stalls in the little alleyways—the rose-cheeked apples, the luscious bunches of purple grapes, with the white ones resting in cotton wool in flimsy round wooden boxes, the red pomegranates and the dried peaches, plums, figs, almonds and walnuts! And with my jumping heart was my lisping maudlin tongue, with
its chorus of: ‘I want! I want …’ And how I shouted with pleasure if father occasionally conceded a demand, and how I hung on to the prize gift, eagerly bearing it home all the way!
I shall never forget the closed meat market into which crowded Muhammadans, jostling carcasses of sheep which hung down from iron hooks. Our family, though Hindu, still retained its loyalty to the Aga Khan Ismaili sect and only took in meat killed by a Muhammadan butcher to the appropriate recitation of the verses from the Koran. As we endeavoured to conceal this fact, only I was sent to the Sadar Bazaar meat market in the company of the office orderly, Clayton, or some Muhammadan bandsman, because meat was my manbhatta khana or favourite food.
And on these excursions I got to know the world of the tandurs or cookshops in the bazaar, where lay huge nans made of wheat flour, pyramids of pilaus and sweetmeats, all covered with flies and the soot of oven fires and yet smelling so sharply of the condiments used in their preparation that my mouth still waters everytime I pass by one of these shops anywhere in India.
I can imagine that I had big eyes and that these eyes of mine never closed, because I can see everything, everything—all those barbers squatting on little booths shaving the heads of the Pathans clean, trimming their beards and moustachios or cutting their nails with dangerous-seeming cuticle knives; because I can recollect clearly the faces of the wayside whores, their cheeks painted with crude rouge and their ears and necks loaded with silver jewellery, because I was already conscious of the swarms of filthy, ragged lepers and seminaked beggars, wizened and thin, wilking for the gift of a pice, drawling out continuous blessings on the heads of the passers-by, even as they waved the clusters of flies off the sores on their faces and hands.
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